Drawing upon decades of experience, RAND provides research services, systematic analysis, and innovative thinking to a global clientele that includes government agencies, foundations, and private-sector firms.

The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Health Insurance Benefit Design

The Trump health care proposal would decrease the number of insured and increase consumer health spending among those with marketplace insurance relative to current law. The policies would also increase the federal deficit by varying amounts.

The Clinton health care proposal would increase the number of insured individuals and decrease consumers' health spending relative to current law. However, the policies with the largest coverage gains also increase the federal deficit the most.

This report supports the California Division of Workers' Compensation's efforts to establish a drug formulary by comparing existing workers' compensation formularies and analyzing options for designing and implementing the formulary.

Strategic behavior by health insurers could unravel the market for cures for chronic diseases. The cost of these cures is front-loaded, but the benefits build up over time. Thus, insurers might try to delay treatment or avoid patients who need it, in the hope that they change insurers.

The ACA provides tax subsidies to qualified individuals for purchasing insurance while retaining tax exemptions for contributions to employer-sponsored insurance premiums. There are several options for leveling the financial playing field between the two markets.

As part of its goal of near-universal coverage, the Affordable Care Act requires most Americans to obtain insurance or pay a penalty. Repealing that requirement would significantly reduce health insurance enrollment and cause individual market premiums to rise.

Prescription data on more than one million Marketplace patients shows that those who enrolled earlier were older and used more medication than later enrollees. However, Marketplace enrollees as a whole had lower average drug spending than the employer-sponsored comparison group.

Subsidies in the ACA's health insurance exchanges help stabilize the insurance market by encouraging younger, healthier people to stay enrolled in the face of premium hikes. Critics of the current subsidies have proposed alternatives. What effects would these have?

Using the COMPARE microsimulation model, researchers estimated the effects of reduced enrollment of young adults (invincibles) in the individual health insurance market. Results indicate that reduced enrollment of invincibles is associated with only modest premium increases.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Affordable Care Act's subsidies can continue in all states. According to RAND research cited in the court's majority opinion, a different outcome could've resulted in higher premiums and about 8 million uninsured Americans.

Eliminating subsidies that help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage through government-run health insurance marketplaces would sharply boost costs for consumers as much as 43 percent and cause more than 11 million Americans to lose their health insurance.

Reduced young-adult enrollment in the individual health insurance market created under the Affordable Care Act would lead to modest premium increases; however, eliminating tax credits would substantially increase premiums and reduce enrollment.

Eliminating subsidies that help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage through government-run health insurance marketplaces would boost costs for consumers as much as 43 percent and cause more than 11 million Americans to lose their health insurance.

Research conducted by

Topics

Trending

Related

Researcher Spotlight

Assistant Policy Analyst

Tim McDonald is an assistant policy analyst at RAND and a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Design and previously worked as a research associate at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.